First Lady Michelle Obama is set to make a special cameo appearance on the season finale of NBC’s critically acclaimed comedy “Parks and Recreation.” The season six finale is set for Thursday, April 24 (8-9 p.m. ET).

Mrs. Obama’s scene in the episode titled “Moving Up” was filmed in late February in Miami where she celebrated investments in healthier out-of-school programs as part of her “Let’s Move” initiative dedicated to solving the challenge of childhood obesity.

Piers Morgan‘s show is all but through at CNN, but a remark by one of his representatives seems to have t’d off gun rights enthusiast John Lott.

Credit: Eddie Scarry/TheBlaze

On Tuesday TheBlaze Blog ran a story about a column Lott wrote for National Review, wherein he said the poor ratings that resulted in the cancelation of Morgan’s show had much to do with Morgan’s condescending behavior toward guests who disagree with him on gun issues.

In the column, Lott also rehashed a time when Morgan mocked his “weird pointy bushy eyebrows.”

Asked to respond to Lott’s column, a rep for Morgan told us, “For the record… That’s ridiculous. Just ridiculous.”

It was unclear what, exactly, the rep was calling ridiculous, and we told her as much. She didn’t elaborate.

The remark didn’t sit well with Lott, apparently. He emailed us Thursday requesting the contact information for the rep so that he could ask her “what was wrong” with his column.

Never the one to instigate an argument (or a restraining order), we declined Lott’s request. We told him that we were sure he could understand our reluctance to pass along the email of a contact but that should TheBlaze Blog be selected to replace Morgan in CNN’s 9 p.m. ET slot, we’d be more than happy to host a (make-up?) session between the two parties.

The use of drones by the U.S. military in overseas combat operations still maintains strong support in America. However, domestic use of drones by police is currently a concern to a large number of Americans. And it seems to be somewhat unpalatable to alligators.

Politico Magazine’s Glenn Thrush has a lengthy profile on Vice President Joe Biden and his post-Obama ambitions. We’ve pulled the best parts.

Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

The thing Biden wants “most”: “He’s in a predicament. It’s so big, it’s almost literary,” a member of Obama’s inner circle told me, shortly after a Washington Post/ABC poll showed Clinton leading Biden by an epic 73 to 12 percent, the widest margin ever recorded for a presidential frontrunner. “Never in his entire life has this man been better positioned to get the thing he most wants: the presidency. He’s climbed almost all the way to the top. And guess what? Somebody moved the ladder. How would you deal with that?”

His thoughts on President Obama: “Look, I just have more of a populist strain than Barack does,” he told an associate recently, a statement that clearly hints at 2016 product differentiation from Obama and Clinton, a desire to emphasize that he’s his own man.

His thoughts on Hillary Clinton: Understandably, Biden’s mind is much on Clinton these days, and he has often told friends he thinks he can beat her because he has seen her up close and judges himself at least her equal. (Like every other prominent Democrat with a sense of self-preservation, he is reluctant to criticize her publicly, saying “I’m not getting into that” when I ask him to compare Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom with current Secretary of State John Kerry’s.)

It’s a little weird that newly named MSNBC host Ronan Farrow, 26, was chosen to receive the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Exploration and Journalism, presented to him Wednesday. After all, his new show has been on the air for three days so far and, otherwise, he’s led an unremarkable career in journalism.

The peculiarity of the award wasn’t lost on him, though. “Maybe I can earn a Cronkite award by investigating how long it’ll take me to actually live up to a Cronkite award?” Farrow tweeted just before the award ceremony in New York.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) thinks former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s shot at the presidency, should she decide to run, is less than 50-50. To be exact, the likelihood of a Clinton presidency is 40 percent, Cruz said Thursday.

Credit: Eddie Scarry/TheBlaze

TheBlaze Blog dropped in on an event featuring a Q&A with Cruz, hosted by Politico. There, Cruz said Clinton has been “consistently wrong” on both foreign policy and domestic policy.

He said Clinton’s proposals for health care reform in the 1990s “would have been every bit as disastrous” as “Obamacare” is now and that she’s responsible for the Obama administration’s “alienating (of) allies and cozying up to enemies” abroad.

Other highlights from the Cruz interview:

He said the Republican Party is “better off” today than before the party’s last presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, lost in 2012. Confronted with a new New York Times poll that showed the GOP with an edge heading into the 2014 midterm elections, Cruz said, “If the New York Times agrees with me, I may have to reconsider my position.”

On whether any of his new energy policy proposals would be passed into law, Cruz said, realistically, no. “Not in (Majority Leader) Harry Reid’s Senate.”

He said the “single greatest threat” to U.S. national security is (more…)

If the below quote, representative of Gilder’s economic theory speaks to you, you will want to read on:

“The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventions in the crucible of a competitive marketplace. It is an economics that accords with the constantly surprising fluctuations of our lives.”

1.Knowledge and power ”At the heart of capitalism is the unification of knowledge and power. As Friedrich Hayek, the leader of the Austrian school of economics, put it, “To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind…is to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.” Because knowledge is dispersed, power must be as well.“

2.Human diversity and free markets ”Enforced by genetics, sexual reproduction, perspective, and experience, the most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes—governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions— all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.” (more…)

“Men are men and women are women. There’s a difference. There’s a difference between the genders. Now, men, they’re tied up, a lot of them, in their macho image and that kind of thing… That could be a deficit. They’re kind of not as open to sensitive discussion, maybe, as women. There’s got to be a downside for a woman.”– Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on Wednesday discussing the apparently unavoidable consequences of a female in the White House; as an example, he cited aggressive male leaders a woman president would have to confront, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin